Last letter.  Miss James to Jane Norris July 25 1843.

APPENDIX

Barton’s “Spiritual Law”
Barton’s “Translation of Enoch”
Talfourd’s “Verses in Memory of a Child named after Charles Lamb”
FitzGerald’s “Meadows in Spring”
Montgomery’s “The Common Lot”
Barry Cornwall’s “Epistle to Charles Lamb”

    ALPHABETICAL LIST OF LETTERS

INDEX

FRONTISPIECE

CHARLES LAMB (aged 51). 
From the painting by Henry Meyer at the India Office.

THE LETTERS OF CHARLES AND MARY LAMB

1821-1834

LETTER 264

CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH

[P.M.  January 8, 1821.]

Mary perfectly approves of the appropriat’n of the feathers, and wishes them Peacocks for your fair niece’s sake!

Dear Miss Wordsworth, I had just written the above endearing words when Monkhouse tapped me on the shoulder with an invitation to cold goose pye, which I was not Bird of that sort enough to decline.  Mrs. M. I am most happy to say is better.  Mary has been tormented with a Rheumatism, which is leaving her.  I am suffering from the festivities of the season.  I wonder how my misused carcase holds it out.  I have play’d the experimental philosopher on it, that’s certain.  Willy shall be welcome to a mince pye, and a bout at Commerce, whenever he comes.  He was in our eye.  I am glad you liked my new year’s speculations.  Everybody likes them, except the Author of the Pleasures of Hope.  Disappointment attend him!  How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!  They flatter me in magazines, newspapers, and all the minor reviews.  The Quarterlies hold aloof.  But they must come into it in time, or their leaves be waste paper.  Salute Trinity Library in my name.  Two special things are worth seeing at Cambridge, a portrait of Cromwell at Sidney, and a better of Dr. Harvey (who found out that blood was red) at Dr. Davy’s.  You should see them.

Coleridge is pretty well, I have not seen him, but hear often of him from Alsop, who sends me hares and pheasants twice a week.  I can hardly take so fast as he gives.  I have almost forgotten Butcher’s meat, as Plebeian.  Are you not glad the Cold is gone?  I find winters not so agreeable as they used to be, when “winter bleak had charms for me.”  I cannot conjure up a kind similitude for those snowy flakes—­Let them keep to Twelfth Cakes.

Mrs. Paris, our Cambridge friend, has been in Town.  You do not know the Watfords? in Trumpington Street—­they are capital people.

Ask any body you meet, who is the biggest woman in Cambridge—­and I’ll hold you a wager they’ll say Mrs. Smith.